Chief talks about scandals
The Pac-12’s conference basketball schedule won’t begin for six weeks, but the league is already under a cloud of suspicion because of a bribery scandal that engulfed two of its schools and a shoplifting incident in China that put three UCLA players on indefinite suspensions.
In a visit with The Chronicle’s editorial board Thursday, Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott called the bribery scandal “very concerning” and the UCLA incident “absolutely an embarrassment.”
He said he didn’t think rapid financial increases in college basketball TV contracts and shoe deals exacerbated the cheating that has brought on a widespread FBI investigation.
“There have been issues and scandals in college sports for decades, whether it’s been
around gambling, academic fraud or, in this case, bribery and accusations of directing prospects” to agents, he said. “Just because there are people that are cheating doesn’t mean to me that the system is not structured right.”
Nor does he think college athletes should be paid beyond what schools now provide. He said he sees the academic and financial benefits the conference’s 7,000 athletes receive. “But I do not believe young men and women should go to college as ... a means to earn money or as employees.”
Scott was on a highspeed train to Shanghai when he received a call about the shoplifting incident. He wouldn’t say what he thought the punishment should be for UCLA freshmen LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hall, but predicted it would be “quite significant.”
The idea of dropping sporting trips to China or other countries is not being considered, he said. “We’ve been taking teams to China for six years. Schools have been taking teams overseas for many years. For student-athletes, it’s one of the most valuable experiences they have during their days at universities.”
He provided no reasons for football fans to feel hopeful that the conference’s TV contracts with Fox and ESPN, which run to 2024, can be amended to provide for fewer late kickoffs or greater advance notice of starting times.
The conference presidents agreed to many more Saturday night games and eight Thursday or Friday games, twice the previous number, to help gain more money and exposure, Scott said.
“Our games rate (for TV) is better during the evening than during the day,” he said. “… When our games kick off at 7, 7:30, we’re not up against SEC, ACC and Big Ten games.”
He said Fox Sports’ decision to move the entire first quarter of last Friday’s WashingtonStanford game from FS1 to the obscure FS2 — in favor of NASCAR Trucks racing — “was unimaginable for our fans and for us.”
He addressed his criticism to Fox Sports President Eric Shanks when he got back from China and said Shanks promised to see what he could do “to avoid that situation again.”
Why didn’t Fox move the trucks to the alternate channel instead of a pivotal Pac-12 football game?
“That’s what I would have done, and that’s what I told (Shanks) they should have done,” he said. “As a general rule, they will stick with a sporting event to its conclusion. But there are exceptions from time to time.” He said he told Shanks this should have been one of them.
There are no plans for the Pac-12 Networks to try to associate with a major network as the SEC and Big Ten networks have done. Both those networks earn far more money for their member schools than the Pac-12 Networks do.
The primary motivation behind the Pac-12 Networks, he said, “was not financial” but rather to be able to control the programming, increase exposure for Olympic sports and provide a national outlet for football games, many of which had just regional coverage.
Washington State President Kirk Schulz recently complained about the networks’ revenue, but Scott said they were “not created to pay anyone’s bills. … Six years down the road, there might be some who would like it to be about paying bills, but that’s not the motivation for the network.”